Roses in honor of Rosa Parks make a great gift because it allows you to give someone something beautiful, support a beautiful cause, and honor the legacy of a beautiful woman. Organic Style, an eco-friendly, socially responsible, Fair Trade on-line boutique, is selling the Freedom: Rosa Parks Rose bouquet, and donating a portion of its proceeds to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which Rosa co-founded. The Institute’s youth leadership “Pathways to Freedom” program teaches students the stories and values of the civil rights movement, and encourages them to engage in social justice and, in turn, encourage social justice in their own communities, as they do in the video above made entirely by students in the Pathways Program.

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As I blogged on Friday, Young People For, the program that empowers young progressive leaders to promote social change in their communities, and the Republican National Committee do not share much in common. But over the Martin Luther King Day three-day weekend, these two groups shared the same hotel, where YP4 held their national summit and the RNC held their winter meeting. The diversity among YP4 was truly stunning, as young people from different parts of the world, different ethnicities, different gender identities, different sexual orientation, different life experiences gathered in one place to connect around social change and community building. To be fair, the members of the RNC were also diverse: their skin color ranged from golfer’s tan to translucent; they celebrated diversity by wearing black ball gowns of different sizes and shapes; and their fur coats came from a variety of animals, making the affair a truly inclusive and representative one.But this weekend’s irony is not limited to the RNC YP4 coincidence. The greater irony is the RNC MLK coincidence. How appropriate it is for Republicans, many of whom, including Dick Cheney, fought hard against making Martin Luther King Day a holiday, to take advantage of this three holiday to hold their winter meeting. As they planned committee activities and events for an administration that has eroded–and is still eroding– so many of the gains of the civil rights movement, for which King fought and died, did these RNCers think they were honoring Martin Luther King’s memory?